October 19, 2017 On Poetry The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow By Ed Simon C. Hansen, La Fête D’Aegir, 1861 “What could be dafter / Than John Skelton’s laughter?” —Robert Graves Sometime early in the sixteenth century, a frequently hungover, perennially in trouble, and womanizing priest named John Skelton took to the lectern at his church. He faced his angry congregation and tried to explain the bastard child born to his mistress. Despite his Cambridge education, his humanist credentials, the fact that he’d once been tutor to Prince Henry, and the immaculate poetry he’d penned, the good Christians of Diss, Norfolk, had complained to their bishop about the priest’s behavior. Skelton may have claimed that (when it came to poetry at least) he’d imparted “drink of the sugared well / Of Helicon’s waters crystalline,” but his congregation was less than impressed. The priest penned inspired lyrics like “Speke, Parrot,” “Phillip Sparrow,” and the immaculate doggerel “The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng,” of which the five-hundredth anniversary is this year. Across these works, he developed an innovative rhythm known appropriately enough as “Skeltonics.” But that sort of thing was of no sway with the bishop. Laity and clergy alike didn’t care for the literary pretensions of this self-styled “British Catullus.” Perhaps it was clear that ordination was not Skelton’s calling, for what could the parishioners expect from sacraments administered by a man who once wrote that “To live under law it is captivity: / Where dread leadeth the dance there is no joy nor pride.” Read More
October 11, 2017 On Poetry Thorn Vine on the Wall By Anthony Madrid I don’t remember what I was talking about, that day in class, but somehow I found myself explaining about the Shijing. The Shijing, I said, is the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry. The poems date back to the Zhou dynasty, which fell apart in the year 256 B.C.E. They are not the oldest poems in the world, but they are old, old. Most of them—and definitely the ones that everybody loves and quotes—sound like the lyrics to folk songs. My paddle keen and bright Flashing with silver Follow the wild goose flight Dip, dip and swing Dip, dip and swing her back Flashing with silver Swift as the wild goose flies Dip, dip and swing That is not a poem from the Shijing. That is a chant the kids did, in canoes, during camping, when my friend Michael Robbins was a ten-year-old nature boy in Colorado (during the Zhou dynasty). I cite it because it is exactly, and I mean exactly, like the poems in the Shijing. Here’s one. Judge for yourself: Read More
October 2, 2017 On Poetry Lost and Pound By Daniel Swift A few weeks ago, I wrote here about a poem I found written on the back of an envelope among Ezra Pound’s papers in Italy. It is a small poem and it runs in full: Hast thou 2 loaves of bread Sell one + with the dole Buy straightaway some hyacinths To feed thy soul. It does not look much like a Pound poem. It is perhaps too tender, too straightforward. Yet, I suggested, it is filled with Pound’s perpetual concerns: with economics, in a minor key; with the possibility of the spiritual in the world of capitalist trade; and with the eternal problems of exchange. However, some sharp-eyed and well-versed readers soon wrote in to say that this sounded awfully like another poem, or other poems. (One subject line: “The Paris Review has been hoodwinked!”) This was, they reported, hardly a Pound poem at all, and in this they were right. Read More
September 15, 2017 On Poetry On Finding a Lost Ezra Pound Poem in a Castle By Daniel Swift The Schloss Brunnenburg, where Ezra Pound once lived. Hast thou 2 loaves of bread Sell one + with the dole Buy straightaway some hyacinths To feed thy soul. —Ezra Pound I found this short poem by Ezra Pound as I was researching a book about Pound’s years in Saint Elizabeths Hospital. It appears for the first time in my book The Bughouse and in the Fall issue of The Paris Review. Finding a previously unpublished poem by Ezra Pound sounds both adventurous and grittily archival, but really, this was neither. It was waiting in an obvious place: in the Schloss Brunnenburg, in the Tyrol, in Northern Italy, which is the fairy-tale castle where Pound lived late in his life, and where his daughter still lives today. The poem wasn’t lost, it just hadn’t been found; and perhaps this is because it doesn’t look quite right. It is too tender, too small. It isn’t hugely complicated. Everyone knows that Pound was the archetypal impossible modernist, austere and difficult. Yet here was a little poem, written on the back of an envelope, about flowers. It lacks, for better and for worse, the grandeur we expect. Read More
August 14, 2017 On Poetry Unlocking the Unconscious Through Poetry By Matthew Zapruder Thiago Rocha Pitta, Heritage, 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Thiago Rocha Pitta On the cover of this pocket-size edition of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poet stands in a doorway. He wears the somehow simultaneously ill-advised and completely stylish ensemble of a half-unbuttoned patterned shirt and tight beltless pants. Looking closer, the doorway seems to open not to a room or to the outside but to a closet: on a shelf behind him there is a pot or urn, and the flatness of the photograph makes it seem a bit as if he is wearing it on his head, like a bizarre hat. He is looking straight out of the front of the book, with a direct, slightly furrowed expression. He is about to smile beneath his full mustache. Something strange is just about to happen. When I bought this copy of Self-Portrait, in 1993, I had just begun a doctoral program at UC Berkeley. Full of a desire, secret to everyone including myself, to live a creative life, I was skeptical about, but also attracted to, poetry. Now, holding this same book in my hand, I remember that time, and how Ashbery’s poems at first didn’t seem to make any sense, or go anywhere, or do anything. I felt angry reading them, as if I were in the presence of a giant literary hoax that I had the choice either to sanction or to condemn. The situation felt profoundly ethical to me. The poems offended my sense of what poetry, and art, should do. Read More